Gaze to the Stars: AI and Public Art from Personal Affect and Collective Empathy

Gaze to the Stars is an AI-mediated participatory public art installation that transforms the MIT Great Dome into a platform for collective emotional storytelling. 200 Participants engage in reflective conversations with a large language model, their responses encoded as Braille into their iris videos and projected onto the Dome. Using affective narrative embedding, iris segmentation, and emotional clustering, the project visualizes both shared and personal affect. Through Gaze to the Stars, we frame AI not as a tool for efficiency, but as a companion—inviting self-reflection and fostering civic empathy within public space. Requests for name changes in the electronic proceedings will be accepted with no questions asked. However name changes may cause bibliographic tracking issues. Authors are asked to consider this carefully and discuss it with their co-authors prior to requesting a name change in the electronic proceedings. Use the "Report an Issue" link to request a name change. Do not remove: This comment is monitored to verify that the site is working properly